Art & Poetry… Deep in the Heart.. All Content is subject to the copyright of Nina Fabunmi

Month: January 2015

I made her out of earth, moulded her into the canvas and gently sculpted her gesture and her curves. I sheltered her with vines and ferns, embracing her to give her cover. She sits in her shelter, gently disposition, shy as she is ,she looks to the other side. She is raw, pure, untouched, nude to show her lack of desire for mundane things. She is in the wild. She is the beauty in the wild.

I returned to our humble beginnings, the creation of man, and how we once lived. Unclothed, at one with nature, running free in the bushes. Technology has revamped the world, a simple existence like this , now so rare, it’s even seen as queer .Imagine a world where the wild once thrived, now a thing of the past but there is beauty in the wild

Daddy died in June last year. He shut his eyes in sleep and never awoke. His spiritual being decided to exit his body and still he is asleep. I have cried , I am still crying and I am wandering where he went. I started doing a lot of research on life after death. I even consulted Buddhism and Hinduism to try to figure this out. Where did daddy go? Can he see me? What is his next move?

When he was ill two years ago, he saw spirits wandering on the highway he travelled. They tried to call him in , but he was not ready to go. I know now that there are those who wander the earth but can’t be seen.

When I walk by and hear the motion of the wind whistling through the trees, I feel like I hear voices. The sun looks down on us , passing the baton to the moon at night. Birds in the sky look over us. I feel like daddy sees me, he is an angel in heaven wearing a golden robe that glows. Telling me that he is with me always and that I will soar above all that I have to conquer to live a fulfilled life.

We walk on the same streets that other’s walk on. There are eyes everywhere , the ones we see and those that we don’t see because someone is watching.

Could she charm you with a gaze
Place you in a maze
I put her in a haze
Slapped the paint unto the canvas to capture her energy
Colors , that she may reveal her coco hide
How the light bounces back and forth off it
A face that you may embrace
She looks at you, calling you
Interactive, this piece talks to you
Clothed in her hair
Falling off her back
She turns to you
Allure

Men in dressed in neon orange, working day in and day out. Digging , hitting , drilling , escavating , aided by their heavy machinery. Each time I pass by the street seems to assume a new look. At Christmas , it was a park, I walked on green grass and sat on white seats that glowed, but when the new year came, the barricades were mounted, the grass turned to sand, and out came the men in their neon suits again.

I thought I could take a walk, and watch the cars drive by, I wanted to play on the grass again and watch the children roll on it. Gentrification , a word I have become accustomed to hearing anytime someone talks about the changes happening in the city. As an artist , I feel obliged to document visually , to remember what it used to be. We couldn’t drive by and when we walked by we had to be given directions , looking up at the luminous orange street sign that said , “Detour at Union Square”.

I tried to describe this piece but his words were better than mine, so I quote…

“Split Image is the portrait of a man drenched in the mesmerizing but indefinable contours of a convoluted identity. This is the portrait of a proud and defiant individual who comports himself with an audacity that is at once confounding and inviting. Fabunmi’s spirit soars in this painting, accented as it were by brush strokes that are suggestive of the privilege granted only to a few. He is Caucasian. Really? He is Black: a product of some form of miscegenation, the type that the African-American artist, Archibald Motley, loved to celebrate in his paintings. Or is her? He is Rastafarian. He is …Well, he could be Nina Fabunmi’s alter ego: a subconscious articulation of her notion of Black Diaspora. Fabunmi enunciates in this painting the pangs and agonies, the stoicism and determination, the pride and confidence, which are contingent on the assertion of selfhood and issues of identity.”
……….Dele Jegede
Art Historian, Art Critic, Art Administrator, Painter & Cartoonist.

‘Split Image’ won Best of the Show for Artist Portfolio Magazine Portraits Edition in 2014 and is published in Issue 15 & Issue 19 of the magazine.